Daniel Clinci
Machinery fetishism
„The illusion that plants and animals are machines for manufacturing raw materials which become fuels for our bodies which are also machines has created the industrial agriculture and food paradigm which is at the root of the explosion of chronic diseases is in our times.”
– Vandana Shiva
„Once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine […].”
– Karl Marx
In Das Kapital, Marx talks about commodity fetishism in capitalism as the way in which commodities, i.e. objects fabricated by labor, lose their relation to labor as a social practice as soon as they enter the realm of exchange. An object becomes a commodity when it is, well, marketed. Its value is not assessed in terms of the labor put into making it, but in terms of money. Ultimately, this „belief” in money is commodity fetishism.
There is another belief that is at work in today’s capitalist world. Machinery fetishism is that belief in the automatic subservience of every thing, biotic or abiotic, to the logic of capital – grow or bust!

Obviously, rocks, waters, plants and animals are such machines. There are no weeds in capital’s fields, only high yield monocultures. This is also very true of the human animal. Fisher: „All that is solid melts into PR.” Educational systems are required to produce ever more efficient machines to fulfill the „needs of the economy.” Then, get a job, work hard, get promoted, buy more shiny stuff. Become useless and die. Our bodies are also machines, only here insofar as to serve capital. When we stop doing it, we become invisible, nomads, just wandering through the desert of the real. This is machinery fetishism: the belief that everything is a machine in the service of capital. Social relations themselves became machinic, automatic. Like, haha, angry face, wow, love. That’s the entire gamut of emotions we’re supposed to feel. Everything outside it is probably anti-capitalistic. Or maybe not. Big Pharma offers us supressors for every emotion that might interfere with our machinic labor, so it’s all under control. We have names for these emotions and we call them diseases. Then there are the pandemics. It’s always funny to see how states get all the blame, but it’s the corporations which are in fact in control. Capital always needs new enemies. In the meantime, epidemiologists are quitting their jobs. There’s nothing in it for them anymore. „Gift economy” only works when the colonized gift the colonizer, not the other way around. Colored glass beads and smallpox for gold not included.

Actually, machinery fetishism is another way of saying every thing exists only for capital to reproduce itself. Capital is theological, hence the fetishism. Some have called it „the Tinkerbell effect” – capital and the (non)social relations it constructs exist only insofar as we believe in them. However, it is essential to rethink politics in non-capitalistic terms if we ever hope to be able to say, once again, that God is dead.